Half Fast Living @gaillardiapress.com

By RAHN ADAMS

We all know it’s coming. Sooner or later, a mass shooting will come to our town — to our school, our college, our worship center, our movie theater, our concert venue, our park, our store, our workplace.

And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

Right?

Guns. Violence. Hate. Mental illness. Video games. Movies. Television. The Internet. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The President. The Congress. The Judiciary. The Fourth Estate. We, the People. We, the Tired, the Poor, the Huddled Masses, the Homeless, the Wretched Refuse of Teeming Shores throughout our nation’s storied past. Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness. The Second Amendment. Laws. Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And, lest I forget, thoughts and prayers. I didn’t bother to capitalize those two words, even though What We Think and What We Say — whether to our God or to our Neighbor in the broadest senses of both words — are fundamentally more important than anything in the previous paragraph’s long list of nouns.

Continue reading Fill in the Blank: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Las Vegas, __________

By RAHN ADAMS

Remember how you felt when a telephone number was attached to your name for the first time?

I phrased it that way because times have certainly changed since August 1980 when my name first appeared in the Southern Bell telephone listings for Valdese, North Carolina. These days anyone can walk into almost any store and walk out with affordable phone service. Those phones are called “burners” because they’re so cheap and basically disposable.

We’re assigned so many new phone numbers so often now that one definitive 10-digit string is no longer burned into our foreheads as our own personal “mark of the beast.” For that matter, I’ve probably had 666 phone numbers in my life but am lucky if I can remember the one — or two or three — I have now.

In 1980, though, the process of becoming an official Southern Bell subscriber involved deposits, credit checks, references, and even promises to name all newborn family members some variation of Alexander, Graham, or Bell. That’s why there are so many Alexes of both sexes now, and so few Grahams and Belles, because ordinary folks couldn’t afford a second kid after they’d paid for all the long-distance calls to announce little Alex’s birth.

Yes, Virginia, there were long-distance charges back then. Long-distance calls were so expensive that we couldn’t just pick up the phone and dial up friends or family members outside the county whenever we wanted, sometimes not even within our own county. There had to be a good reason — like new life or death — to incur the wrath of the Long-Distance Operator, especially before direct dialing and calling cards were invented.

Continue reading Dear AT&T: Is This the End of a Beautiful Friendship?

By RAHN ADAMS

The flowers at our house have been beautiful since March, but the blossoms are slowing down as we trudge deeper, ever deeper into the dog days of summer.

I’ve always liked flowers. The daisy-like gaillardia or blanket flower is my favorite, thus the name of our website. On the North Carolina coast where we used to live, gaillardia is as common as the dandelion is in the Piedmont and mountains. So now, whenever I spot a bunch of the humble red-and-yellow blossoms at the Lowe’s Garden Center or Biltmore Gardens, I think of our adopted home in Brunswick County. For some reason, we can’t get gaillardia to grow at our houses.

Living with two gardeners — Mom for 21 years, then Timberley for 38 — has helped me appreciate not just the wildflowers and weeds that Nature brings us, but also the flowers, trees and shrubs we’ve planted ourselves: the camellia, Lenten rose, breath of spring, crocus, daffodil, sweet bubby, azalea, thrift, candytuft, yellowbell, dogwood, iris, snowball bush, sweet William, clematis, rhododendron, hibiscus, violet, moonflower, tea olive, peony, gardenia, echinacea, coreopsis, foxglove, dahlia, gladiolus, daisy, black-eyed Susan, nasturtium, hosta, butterfly bush, crepe myrtle, sunflower, marigold, phlox, rose of Sharon, and several varieties of lilies and roses, just to name some of the blossoms I’ve seen at our houses this growing season.

But this column isn’t just about beautiful flowers. It’s also about how we look at objects of allure — flowers, friends, lovers, heroes, villains — and what we see in them and in ourselves.

Continue reading As Aristotle Said, ‘One Flower Does Not a Garden Make’

By RAHN ADAMS

It had been a long time since I’d thought much about learning to drive on that long, winding country road of my youth.

As we get older, our attention turns to other, more grown-up concerns, like finding steady jobs, finding people to love and to love us, and finding good ways to leave our marks on the world.

Before long, we forget the thrill of being 16 years old and driving that old car home late on a Friday night, and punching the accelerator at just the right spot coming out of the last curve — where the patched asphalt dips — before the long straight-away up, up, up and then over the dimly-lit hill, then down the narrow two-lane blacktop, staying on the gas and off the brake pedal until the last possible seconds before that hard right turn toward the distant bridge, with tall, dark cornfields on both sides of this pot-holed rural byway running along the widening river near and far, but always within sight of the trees along this shadowy watercourse’s banks, as these streams of grayish water and lined pavement wind together and cross one another time and again, through the heart of this beautiful valley.

When we’re young, we take our chances — too many, perhaps, and too often. But when we’re old, we often play it safe and put on the brakes, maybe just a bit too soon. If we’re not careful, that’s how we handle not just experiences but also the people in our lives.

Continue reading You Can Go Home Again, But Call Ahead for Reservations

By RAHN ADAMS

When my musical hero James Taylor started wearing a hat on stage a few years ago, I started thinking about covering my own bald head in public.

I always admired James back when he didn’t seem to mind letting his fans know he was losing his hair. Look at his album covers from the ’80s and most of the ’90s. Until his 1997 album Hourglass, JT didn’t try to cover his male pattern baldness, unlike, say, Elton John, Beach Boy Mike Love, Jim Seals of the popular ’70s duo Seals & Crofts, and countless cowboy-hatted country singers.

James’s lack of pretension when it came to his receding hairline was refreshing. It was honest. And it made his songs seem that much more true to life and heartfelt, to be sung by a man who apparently cared more about the depth of his music than the superficiality of his image.

Along those lines, I never trust any balding man who has the audacity to wear an ugly or cheap toupee, like televangelist and faith-healer Ernest Angley, or who sports a bad comb-over, especially really silly-looking or Aqua Net-dependent ones like Donald Trump’s perpetual swirly. Who do they think they’re fooling, anyway?

Continue reading What If You’re a Man Who Wears Many Hats, But None of Them Fits Quite Right?

By RAHN ADAMS

Anyone who knows me sees the irony in my 730-mile road trip for a bottle of bourbon. I’m not a big drinker of anything stronger than Mountain Dew, and even that is off-limits now due to its sweetness.

But there we were last Friday at 4:15 a.m. — oh-dark-thirty, as Timberley called it — backing the Gray Goose, our trusty minivan, out of the driveway and onto the first leg of Siri’s 365-mile route to historic Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky.

We were headed northwest on Interstate 40 in the east Tennessee mountains when the sun rose about two hours later. We had already stopped at the all-business Haywood County (N.C.) I-40 Rest Area and, therefore, didn’t need to be officially welcomed to the Volunteer State at its fancier facility up the road.

Continue reading It’s Time for Sunrise Road Trips, Quixotic Quests and Overdue Reunions

By RAHN ADAMS

You would have enjoyed my first draft’s opening sentence about reading The Mueller Report much more than this one.

My discarded lede used the same, shall I say, colorful language that President Trump uses in various parts of the most awe-inspiring research document I’ve ever read — awesome just from a retired English teacher and former journalist’s perspective. From other viewpoints, the Report’s findings should inspire regret and trepidation among reasonable readers about what has happened to American democracy and to the Presidency over the past few years, and what could conceivably happen next.

But back to my first sentence, I figured that if the President says bad words and no one really cares, then I could say them, too. Still, unlike our President, who never descends from his bully pulpit, I decided not to be provocative just to get your attention, and not to use profanity when, instead, civility is what our divided society needs. That’s how we’ll keep Russia from succeeding again — by banding together to fight off attacks instead of letting them divide and conquer us, which is what they did in the 2016 Campaign and could do again in the 2020 Campaign.

Also, in this book report of sorts, I’ve decided to focus not on what other journalists and pundits have been discussing — sometimes inaccurately — ever since the redacted Report’s release two months ago, but on what I haven’t read or heard anywhere yet about potential “collusion,” neither in the mainstream press nor on social media. That’s not to say no one else has made these observations, just that I’m not aware of them in the reporting and commentary I’ve encountered so far.

If you’re hesitant to click the “Continue Reading” link below, rest assured that I’ll be relatively brief (my 1,600 words compared to Mueller’s 448 pages). It took me over two weeks to read The Mueller Report aloud from start to finish, but I can sum up my take on it in one sentence to save you from reading more than you might want of this, especially if you’re an unrepentant Trump supporter who still claims to be a truth-loving Christian: Donald J. Trump is a prolific liar and one of the most corrupt Presidents in U.S. history. But we already knew that, right? Well, now we have official documentation.

Continue reading Will Mueller’s Facts Impeach Trump’s Lies? Will Truth Defeat Deceit?

By RAHN ADAMS

Pardon me while I vent.

Through the miracles of modern technology, if not modern medicine, I’m writing this column, start to finish, as I sit in the waiting area of our local hospital.

This hospital, in an earlier iteration, was where both Timberley and I were born — me, almost 60 years ago; Timberley, well, fewer years than that. It’s where a brother, grandparents, uncles, aunts and countless friends died in years past.

It’s where through the years we’ve visited sick relatives and friends who have actually recovered and returned to normal living, so — contrary to what some people say, that this hospital is where people go to die — this local institution is a key part of our hometown. The people who walk these halls and occupy these rooms are a true microcosm of this community.

Continue reading Patience Is a Virtue That We No Longer Have Time For — or Do We?

By RAHN ADAMS

Its official title is the Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, but everyone knows it as The Mueller Report.

It may as well be called Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, because few people who really need to read it are doing so or likely ever will. I’m talking about the good evangelical Christian folks who value Truth, Justice and the American Way but still voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, here’s the important part, will vote to re-elect him in 2020, no matter who runs against him. I’m not talking about intelligent, sensible Americans who can face facts now and admit they made a grievous error in judgement three years ago. Continue reading Robert Mueller’s Day Off: We’re Waiting for the Movie, But All We’re Getting Is a Reality Show

By RAHN ADAMS

This past Sunday I finally took out my white flag — actually, my credit card — and paid for a digital subscription to one of my hometown newspapers. Even though President Trump calls the news media the “enemy of the people,” I decided that since I couldn’t beat ’em, I might as well join ’em — “them” being the Lenoir News-Topic’s army of subscribers.

In one regard Trump was right: The newspaper’s wall — firewall, that is — was just too “big and beautiful,” from the News-Topic circulation department’s perspective, anyway, for me to get past. Time and again, I’ve tried to dash onto the paper’s website to read an article, column or obituary, only to be reminded that I was an undocumented visitor at newstopicnews.com and that my paperwork needed to be on file to enjoy the benefits of subscribership.

Continue reading ‘Enemy of the People’ Wins the Battle, Maybe the Whole War